Some DEs are focused on resource efficiency, but don’t look fancy. Others are fancy, but require a fairly modern setup. I have KDE (Fedora) installed on my laptop, I love its look and options. But it is not always snappy, some little freezes occur as well, even in basic situations (opening Firefox and v2rayN simultaneously was one of the cases). The most problematic thing is almost every app taking around 2-3 secs to open its window.
Many people would just tell me to install Xfce, but I still want a fancy desktop, I believe it is something I can afford on my setup. First I thought of GNOME, but it is controversial: some sources report GNOME as well optimized even for low-end machines, other claim it is much heavier than KDE.
What it your experience with desktop environments and their performance? Perhaps you have compared various DEs within the same distro and setup? How performant GNOME actually is compared to KDE? What are the balanced options to explore?
I use and love KDE Plasma. I don’t tend to have performance issues, but I have pretty high-end hardware (per 2023). The performance should be dependent on your hardware. If KDE on your laptop has performance issues, then the only thing that will improve it is if you get a new laptop with better specs. Otherwise, I’d recommend Xfce, Mate, or possibly COSMIC. There have been a lot of improvements lately for Wayland support under Xfce. If you want to use Qt-based applications, then maybe LXQT would be right for you. It’s like the love child of LXDE and KDE. I personally can’t stand it myself, lol. It never felt right to me. But like, that’s just me. As you may know, one’s choice of desktop environment or window manager is highly subjective. So just try a bunch of things out. Don’t use a VM to try them because it won’t have the same feel as running natively. Maybe have a separate ‘testing’ partition where you install some distro and play around with various DEs and WMs. CachyOS makes it super easy to install them using meta packages.